Giles Foden
sifts the many selves of William Boyd in Any Human Heart, where the
author turns his gaze inwards

Any
Human Heart
William Boyd
503pp, Hamish Hamilton, £17.99

A quotation from
Henry James furnishes the title of William Boyd's new novel: "Never
say you know the last word about any human heart." These "intimate
journals" of Logan Mountstuart initially seem ready for the challenge.
But, as becomes clear, both reality and art have a way of endlessly
bifurcating the whole truth into many.

Born in 1906 and
brought up in South America, Logan is the son of a Scottish beef baron,
Francis Mountstuart, and his secretary, Mercedes de Solis. "I stir
the memory soup in my head hoping gobbets of Uruguay float to the surface.
I can see the frigorifico - a vast white factory with its stone jetty
and towering chimneystack. I can hear the lowing of a thousand cattle
waiting to be slaughtered, butchered, cleaned and frozen."

Logan's life - either
as diary entries, or redacted into small, third-person bridging passages
- is similarly prepared for public consumption by Boyd. We see him at
public school in England in the 1920s with his friends Peter Scabius
and Benjamin Leeping, and then at Oxford, where he falls in love with
the mysterious Land Fothergill. A public, historical narrative shadows
the personal one: "Coffee with Land Fothergill at the Cadena. She
was wearing a velvet coat that matched her eyes. We talked a little
stiffly about Mussolini and Italy and I was embarrassed to note how
much better informed she was than I."

Embarrassment turns
out to be Logan's key note, as we follow him into a literary career,
several marriages, and meetings with a host of famous folk through the
century. But the flipside of modest, unassuming Logan is sexual staggishness
and a refusal to be cowed by grand public figures. After a monograph
on Shelley and a bestselling novel about a French prostitute, he drifts
into alcohol, adultery and literary criticism.

A spiky encounter
with Virginia Woolf is followed by meetings with Picasso and Joyce in
Paris. A spell as a reporter in the Spanish Civil war brings him into
contact with Hemingway and into possession of three Braque canvases.

The paintings are
eventually sold by Logan's old schoolfriend Leeping, now a successful
gallery owner - who will, in time, offer Logan a job as his New York
representative. In the interval come both the book's most entertaining
and harrowing sections. Working for Ian Fleming (another womaniser)
in naval intelligence during the second world war, Logan is posted to
the Bahamas to keep an eye on the Duke of Windsor and Mrs Simpson. Edward
is suspected of links with German financiers.

The murder of a
Bahamian bigwig seems to involve the Duke, and Logan feels honour-bound
to investigate. But the whole thing is hushed up. Recalled to London,
he is parachuted into Switzerland, where he is to pose as a Uruguayan
shipbroker offering passage to fleeing Nazis. Picked up almost at once
by Swiss intelligence, he spends the rest of the war in prison. On returning
to England, he suffers a nervous breakdown.

It later turns out
that his betrayal to the Swiss may have been Edward and Mrs Simpson's
revenge upon him. Logan runs into them again on New York's 5th Avenue
in the 1960s. "I can't resist it and shout out: 'WHO KILLED SIR
HARRY OAKES?' The look of terrified panicked shock on their faces is
adequate compensation for me - for everything they did to me, for all
time. They can do their worst now. They scramble into their limousine
and are swept away."

Logan himself -
as his friend Peter Scabius rises to literary stardom - also suffers
a mighty fall. By the 1970s, after a period as a schoolmaster in Biafra,
and now quite forgotten as a writer, he is living on dogfood and selling
revolutionary newspapers in London - a profession which leads him into
involvement with the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

At the same time,
however, the Tate references remind us that Any Human Heart is a created
work expressing the concerns, passions and hobbyhorses of its begetter
- just as, in one sense, Logan's journal does. As he puts it: "We
keep a journal to entrap the collection of selves that forms us, the
individual human being."

Yet while it proclaims
its own internal flux ("the true journal...doesn't try to posit
any order or hierarchy, doesn't try to judge or analyse"), Any
Human Heart is actually a highly ordered and controlled encounter with
that classic French literary form, the journal intime.

Logan's true secret
sharer, the real tongue in his mouth, is Boyd himself, of course. From
his 1981 debut, A Good Man in Africa, onwards, he seems constantly to
have been searching for a unifying identity across different fictions,
trying to make sense of a life comprising a brutal public-school education,
Africa in wartime, Oxford (where he did a PhD on Shelley), literary
London and New York glamour: to a large degree, the plot of Any Human
Heart . So when all is said and done, the heart the novel tries to dissect
is the author's own. It is, as ever, an enjoyable spectacle for his
readers.